As modern enterprise networks become more complex and diverse, the effort required to configure and manage network alerts and thresholds becomes increasingly challenging.

What is intelligent alerting and thresholding?

Intelligent alerting and thresholding simply refers to leveraging data analytics, such as anomaly detection and behavioral forecasting, to drive and refine the threshold and alerting processes within your chosen network monitoring tool.

Why do I need intelligent alerting and thresholding?

There has been a rapid and widespread take-up of cloud-based networks, SDN and NFV solutions, in addition to an incredible expansion in the adoption of IoT. In 2021, over 10 billion IoT devices were recorded. Current estimates state that by 2025 150,000 new IoT devices will be coming online every minute.

Consequently, the requirements for monitoring these networks are changing rapidly, especially when it comes to alerting functionality.

Modern network performance monitoring (NPM) tools, such as Techniche Statseeker NPM, have risen to the challenge by incorporating data analytics into the product and applying that functionality to intelligent alert configuration and management.

Traditional versus intelligent network alerting and thresholding

Traditional threshold and alert configurations use static thresholds, for example: “link utilization greater than 70%”, or “subscribed VPN connections over 80%”. These fixed values fall short of identifying unusual behavior which occurs below these thresholds. Imagine you have a link which typically sits around 20% utilization but has been running at 55% for the last 3 hours. This would not trigger the threshold but is certainly worth looking into.

Modern NPMs automatically baseline your network behavior. Tools such as Statseeker NPM do this for every metric, on every device and interface on your monitored network. That means not only link utilization, but CPU, memory and filesystem utilization, firewall and VPN connections, an historic baseline for everything.

You can then employ anomaly detection and alert on variations from that baseline behavior. Does what we are seeing right now vary from the expected behavior for this metric, on this device, at this time, on this day of the week? If so, send me an alert. As your network evolves and typical network behavior changes, these baseline models automatically update, maintaining the relevancy of your threshold and alert configurations.

Benefits of intelligent network alerting and thresholding

As you bring new infrastructure online, the automated grouping logic and rules within Statseeker NPM are applied. Your new kit is added to the relevant hardware breakdown groups specific to your network. Threshold and alert configurations leverage these groups to target specific hardware, and so your existing alerts are automatically applied to your new hardware, where applicable.

When moving services and networks into the cloud, baselines can be rebuilt excluding the previous configurations and establishing a ‘new normal’ to be utilized by your already defined anomaly detection-based alert configuration.

These baseline models are also employed with thresholding and alerting on predictive analytics: identifying how network usage is evolving, projecting this behavior into the future, and then identifying potential performance issues and network failures. Proactively addressing these identifiable patterns allows you optimize network performance and address issues before they affect network operations, by spending your time preventing fires rather than attempting to put them out.

As your network evolves, ensure that your chosen NPM offers your team the proactive tools needed to reduce the burden and respond efficiently to the needs of your network and users.

Example custom dashboard using the outputs from alerts and threshold configuration

Next steps ..

Techniche Statseeker NPM helps MSPs, businesses and government organizations meet their real-time network performance requirements.

If you’d like to try Techniche Statseeker NPM for 45 days at no cost, request your trial here.

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